Boris Strugatsky and his older brother Arkady, who died in 1991, were the Soviet Union's best-known science-fiction writers and, from the early 1970s, gained an international reputation as their work was regularly translated into English. Their Noon Universe is the setting for 10 novels and various offshoot works, written over a quarter of a century, while other stories were adapted for the cinema, most notably Tarkovsky's Stalker.

Who knew that Apple – the technology firm, not the record label – had its very own fifth Beatle? The Stu Sutcliffe to Steve Jobs's Lennon and Steve Wozniak's McCartney is Ronald Wayne, now 78 and living alone in a bungalow in Nevada from where he supplements his social security payments by selling stamps and old coins.

The money the Government stands to gain from the auction of the 4G mobile spectrum represents that extremely rare and happy event in public finances: a genuine windfall. It should be treated as such. It should not be ploughed back to vanish in the Treasury's vaults; it should not be seized by the Chancellor to plug gaps elsewhere. It should be set aside to support programmes in a conceptually related area that might not otherwise attract funding.

Gart Westerhout was an astronomer who gained international renown in the early 1950s when he helped chart the Milky Way galaxy with unprecedented precision, and who later created the astronomy programme at the University of Maryland in the United States.